There is an increasing concern regarding the safe disposal of trash or waste material from a variety of sources. Trash or waste material varies widely in composition and not only is it hazardous in many instances, but the by-products of the disposal system may yield material that is infectious, carcinogenic, toxic and pungent, not to mention bulky and unsightly. Incineration of waste material is an attractive alternative as compared to many other processing methods. The incineration process burns combustible materials producing various by-products. By-products include an exhaust made of combustible and non-combustible gases, ash, and non-combustible residue. In many instances, the by-products pose greater potential hazards than the original waste material.
Conventional incineration systems presently in use are basically comprised of a primary combustion module (using an oxygen starved atmosphere) and a secondary combustion module (using an oxygen rich atmosphere) sometimes known as the afterburner. An improved incinerator system that achieves a better burn with reduced emissions reverses the combustion process of a conventional system using an oxygen enriched primary and oxygen starved secondary chamber. The improved system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,203,267.
Conventional incineration systems have the disadvantage that they require manual control, monitoring, and maintenance. Each subsystem of present incinerator systems has a separate controller. A controller for one system has limited access to the performance characteristics of other subsystems. This leads to inefficient operation of the overall incinerator system, which in turn can result in preventing the level of incineration of the waste material required to make the waste material safe and reduce the overall efficiency of the system. Also, since each of the subsystems in presently available incinerators are individually controlled, adjusting the operating parameters for optimum performance of the entire system is not easily achieved. This is particularly troublesome when operation requirements for the incinerator systems change, e.g. low energy waste materials vs. high energy waste materials.
Currently available incinerator systems also have manual start-up and shut-down procedures, wherein each module of the subsystem must be manually actuated in order to achieve the desired start-up or shut-down of the entire system. Also, prior stand-alone subsystem incinerator systems cannot take advantage of improved control technologies as they evolve to provide faster and more powerful computing, monitoring, and feedback controls.